Ezra Klein’s unassailable observation, that the president more nearly resembles a moderate Republican of early 1990’s vintage than a socialist Muslim born in Kenya, will probably be misinterpreted by a lot of progressives as an insult. But Klein’s point is not to complain about Obama’s policies, but to defend them as thoroughly mainstream. That is why Klein documents the support prominent Republicans displayed for an individual mandate in health care, Cap and Trade environmental policy, and sane tax policy, before those policies were offered by a Democrat. I think Klein is mostly interested in the possibility that Republicans are moving right, not out of any shift in principles, but out of a simple refusal to cooperate with a Democratic president.
What is of more concern to progressives, however, is that the political landscape has shifted so far to the right that Democrats are now being labeled as radicals for proposing Republican solutions to our problems. I don’t have a solution for this. At least, nothing comes to mind in the short-to-medium term. As I have argued for two years, the way our system is set up constitutionally, combined with the rules of the Senate, and exacerbated by the Citizen’s United ruling, the minority has effective veto power and the minority is completely in the hands of corporate interests.
Real change is possible, but extraordinarily difficult. Only fate can tell us whether we’ll be able to change the composition of the Supreme Court. No amount of lobbying or organizing will have any impact on that whatsoever, except insofar that it keeps a Democrat in the White House in case a conservative judge leaves the Court. We aren’t going to abolish the Senate and the Senate’s failure to change its rules after the unprecedented obstruction of the last Congress proves that those rules are unlikely to ever change. I haven’t even mentioned the media, but that is just one more example of out-sized corporate influence in our politics. We can strengthen the reach of citizen-journalism, but we can never match the reach of the major networks and radio syndicates.
What’s going on in the Republican Party isn’t sustainable, but as long it lasts, the country actually needs a caretaker that represents the silent majority of sane people. That means that the Democratic Party has the heavy responsibility of being a welcome home to people who were moderate Republicans in the early 1990’s. This is not a necessity driven by ideology. It’s driven by the loss of a responsible alternative to liberalism. It’s also driven by the simple impossibility of overcoming the effective veto-power of Senate Republicans over all congressional legislation. The rise of the DLC took us to much the same place, but for a different reason. Klein might be right that the GOP has moved right simply to remain in clearly-defined opposition. If that is true, the limited success of the DLC had an unintended consequence. The quest for corporate financing moved the Democrats temporarily to the right, which led the right to march over a cliff, which left the Democrats holding onto the rope, trying simply to keep the whole country from slipping over the edge.
Things would be bad and unmanageable even without a Great Recession and unending military commitments all over the globe.
I’m sorry to paint this depressing picture, but this is what things have come to. Progressives need to look at long-term solutions, but they also need to keep a tight focus on the here and now. Things can definitely get worse. There is a lot of dead weight, and it’s uncertain that we can hold on.
